Making Our Christmas Decorations

We had a busy day today putting up, along with making new, Christmas decorations.  Below are pictures and instructions for the decorations we made!

We made 2 different kinds of Christmas trees. For the first one I took a cone-shaped floral cone and wrapped it with green felt.  We wrapped a red pipe cleaner and a shiny green ribbon around it.  I then had the boys take colored ball pointed straight pins and stick them through the foam for ornaments.  They boys enjoyed this because it was easy for them to do :-).  We then took pom poms and pinned them to the top of the tree and a few more around the tree for added effect.

 

For the 2nd tree I took a green pipe cleaner and folded it in half and twisted it.  I then took other pieces of pipe cleaner and twisted them around the first piece to make branches.  I stuck the tree in a piece of floral foam.  I then had the boys put plastic beads on the branches for ornaments.  We put a sequence star on the top.

 

Here are some pictures of the finished trees (on top of the piano mixed in with other decorations).

 

Another thing we did was take some mini foil muffin cups (red and green) and cut a hole in the middle and put them on Christmas lights to give the lights a glow.  Really the only thing the boys could do for this one is point to where they thought I should put them.  They really turned out cool…with all the lights out they have a pretty cool glowing effect.

 

I tried to get some pictures without the flash to capture the glowing effect…these pictures really didn’t capture the effect…but they kind of looked cool anyways :-)

Another thing we made was an ornament wreath.  I bought some pretty red balls (some were shiny and some were glittery).  The site where I found the idea said to use a wire coat hanger…but I can never get those to work very well…plus I don’t think I had enough ornaments to fill one of those…so I just used heavy guage floral wire.  I twisted two pieces together to get the size circle I wanted.  We then put on the ornaments (this was actually a good simple patterning lesson…and Aaron did very well with it…he would hand me a shiny one saying “shiny” and then a glittery one saying “gitter”.  I would ask him what was next and most of the time he gave me the correct one!  I was so proud).

Now my wreath looks more like a pile of ornaments instead of  a circle…but I still think it looks pretty :-)

  

I was so excited when I opened one of our decoration boxes!  I had totally forgotten that we had made garland for our tree last year until I saw it in the box!!  It brought back memories of last year!!  It made me even more excited about this tradition we are starting of making seasonal decorations to enjoy every year!

(this garland was simply a foam bead kit that came with the stringing wire and plastic needle!  We bought two kits and it made enough garland to wrap our 6 1/2 ft tree.)

 

And don’t you love Alyssa’s stocking?  If you didn’t catch the post about us making this stocking then click here to go see it…it includes a giveaway for a Creativity For Kids kit (any kit you would like to try)

 

Christmas Wishes Ornaments

We have started making our Christmas decorations.  Our new tradition of making seasonal decorations to enjoy and add to year after year got off to a great start with our fall decorations!  Now it’s time to put those away and start on our Christmas decorations.

We started today with our Christmas wish ornaments.  I found the ideas for these here.  I instantly fell in love with the idea and knew that we had to do these ourselves!

I did make some changes to the supplies and steps due to what I had here at the house.  Here is how we made ours:

On the Disney site they called for a wooden spool that you paint…which would be very pretty…but I didn’t have any.  I did have empty plastic spools that I have saved back for crafts.  Since I already had these I didn’t see any need to buy any wooden spools. 

Since I had plastic spools that did not have pretty ends, and I did not want to worry with trying to paint them, I cut out circles from pretty patterned scrapbook paper the size of the end of the spool and attached them with scrapbooking adhesive tape to the end of the spools (oh I punched holes in the middle of the circles before I put them on the spools so that I could thread the ribbon through.

Then I thread through a piece of ribbon through each spool (I found that wrapping the end of the ribbon around the bottom end of a skinny paintbrush helped to guide it through the spool and come out easily on the other side).  Once I got the ribbon threaded I tied the two ends together.  I then used the scrapbook tape to attach the ribbon to the spool where it threads through to keep the spool from spinning on the ribbon.

The site that has the idea stated to cut strips of paper to fit the width of the spool.  I found that party crepe paper was the perfect width of the plastic spools that I had!!  Yeah – no extra cutting!!

So for each spool I cut a piece of crepe paper long enough to put their lists.  If your child is old enough you can have them write their list with a marker on the crepe paper.  Since my kids are too young for that I just had them tell me their list and I wrote it down.

I then attached the list to the spool with a piece of tape (hint – I left some space at the top of the piece of crepe paper so that I could tape it at the bottom of the spool and as it wrapped around the list actually started at the top of the spool.

I then got decorative scrapbook circles and attached them to the end of the ribbon (where I tied the knot) and put the kids name on them!

We hung them on the tree!!  I am hoping that we have started a new tradition with this and this will be our first ornaments to put on the tree every year!

Blessings Posters

Once again I LOVE the decoration we did today!!  I really am liking the way it turned out.

I once again got the idea from a craft book…this one was from a book we got from the library.  The book stated to take a piece of fabric and glue cut outs of fruits and vegetables and then fold over the top edge and hem and then stick a straight stick through it, tie on some string and hang it up…

Ours ended up being a bit different from what the book said…but I think I like our end results better!  It should last longer :-)

What I did is go to the library and use their die cut machine and made fruit and veggie cut outs from cute patterned scrapbook paper.

We then went to Wal-Mart (not knowing what I was going to end up doing before we got there) and ended up getting  a couple cute fabric fat quarter (that you use for making quilts), some stick on glittered foam letters and a poster frame.

When we got home I used my scrapbook adhesive and stuck the fabric to the back of the poster frame.  We then stuck on letters (made the words “Harvest of Blessings”) and stuck on the fruit and veggies using the scrapbook adhesive tape runner.

We then assembled the poster frame and ended up with a very nice looking picture to hang on the wall.

And…it fits so well on the wall that I put it on that this just may turn out to be our seasonal poster wall…we can make one for each season or holiday!  Looks like we will be making a Christmas one soon :-)

Here are some pictures of the finished product (sorry for the flash glare)

 

Soft Sculpture Turkeys

Our Fall Decoration craft was super fun today!!

I found this idea from a craft book.  They said to get a pair of gloves and stuff them with poly-fil stuffing then either sew the wrist of the glove together or glue it.  They then said to take craft feathers and stick through the fingers of the glove and then embellish with google eyes, a gobble, etc…

I originally wanted brown gloves but when I saw that Target had these black gloves on the $1 aisle I couldn’t pass them up!!  Of course Target did not have any craft feathers and I wasn’t in the mood to go to Wal-Mart when we were out yesterday so I came up with another idea for feathers.  I cut out feathers from construction paper and then taped toothpicks to the back of them so that we could stick them in the fingers.  It worked like a charm!

I also realized today that I didn’t have any google eyes that were a size that would work with our gloves but I did have brass brad fasteners.  Not only did it give the turkey a nice brass eye…I let the back of the fastener stick back through the glove to make the beak!  It worked perfect!

The boys sure loved sticking their feathers in their turkeys!!!  This will be fun to bring out year after year…we could even change the feathers every year!!

Here are some finished pictures.

You can kind of see how I did the brads to make the beak in the pictures below  (there is a brad on each side of the turkey)

Fall Craft Day 2

I am so excited about how our craft for today turned out!!!  For those who didn’t see yesterday’s post…we are starting a new tradition in our house…we are making seasonal decorations that we can keep and put out every year and add more to every year.  That way in years to come we will have a treasure of memories decorating our house.

Today we made a fall leaf stained glass picture that I found in a craft book.  Where we live we do not have trees that produce pretty fall leaves…most of the trees around our house are mesquite trees.   But the library has some HUGE trees with big beautiful leaves.  So I decided we would gather our leaves there today since we would be there for story time!  :-)

In the craft book it stated to arrange your leaves in between two pieces of waxed paper and then iron with a steam iron to seal the waxed paper around the leaves. 

I am fortunate to have a laminator and thought that it would look better and hold up longer if we laminated the leaves instead of use the waxed paper. 

So I opened up a laminating sheet and had the boys arrange leaves on there.  We then cut out strips of paper and put around the edges (the book said to glue the strips over the edges after you iron it to create a frame but we decided to laminate it all).  Since Seth has started writing his name I had him write his name on one of the strips.  I wrote Aaron’s name on his picture and then dated them both.  Then we put them through the laminator. 

The boys loved them so much that they wanted to make another one – so we did!!!

Don’t you think they turned out pretty?!?!

Fall Decorations

I have been wanting to start having the boys help me make decorations for the house for the different seasons.  I think it would be so fun to pull out the decorations we have made in the house and then make new ones to add to the collection. In just a few years we could have a house full of reminders of fun memories!!

We are hosting a dinner for our Sunday School class on Saturday night at our house so I decided to go ahead and make some fall decorations for the house and start this tradition!  We are going to try to make at least one decoration every day this week if we can!

Tonight we made a wreath and mantle garland.  I will admit both ended up being advanced for my 4 year old and 2 year old but I did my best to get them to help where I could and it must have worked because they feel proud and really feel like they helped!

The wreath started off to be like a wreath that I found online somewhere (can’t remember where) where they took a wire coat hanger and made it into a circle and then put slits in toilet paper rolls and slid them on and then glued leaves all over it.    You turn around the hook of the hanger so that it can work as a hook for your wreath.

Well I got the wreath prepped with all of that (I got it in the best circle that I could…it is hardly a perfect circle though) and pulled out my box of fake fall leaves that I had.  Well I had in there some decoration sticks that had apples or pumpkins or pine cones with flowers and leaves (don’t know what you call them) and thought they would be pretty.  But of course they were too heavy to glue on the toilet paper rolls…so I ended up attaching them straight to the wire coat hanger with pipe cleaners (had to work with what I had – HA!).  We then glued the leaves on the toilet paper rolls in between them.  I can’t believe that we actually got it to work in the end.

I had Seth pull leaves from their plastic stems and then Aaron would hand them to me and point to where he thought I should put it.  I glued them because I used hot glue so they would stick better. 

Here is the end result.

The other decoration we did was a mantle garland!  I actually saw this idea on the Rachel Ray show today (this is my show that I tape and then relax and enjoy while the kids are napping :-)).

On the show they took a ribbon and some decorative paper clips and silk leaves (they gave the idea of using real leaves for it to).  All they did was paper clip the leaves to the ribbon and then hang the ribbon on the mantle.  It was super easy and super cute!!

Well I don’t have any of those fancy paper clips and doubt my wal-mart in my little town would carry them, but I figured – hey why couldn’t we just staple them on!! 

I gave Seth some leaves and Aaron some flowers and I had them alternate giving me leaves and flowers for me to staple on the ribbon (it actually was a good little lesson in patterns…we may try this again for Christmas garland and maybe find something that would be more than two objects to do a little bit more difficult patterning exercise!). 

Here is our garland!  I LOVED how this turned out!

Tomorrow we are planning on doing some stained glass leaves.  We don’t have good leaves around our house because we have mostly mesquite leaves but we are going to library tomorrow morning and the library yard has some HUGE beautiful leaves!  We are going to make a point to pack a bag so we can pick up some leaves!!

I am really excited about this new tradition…I hope and pray I keep up with it because it really could be a treasure a few years down the road!!